


Gravity's End

by PineWreaths



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, F/M, music box
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 12:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4919542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PineWreaths/pseuds/PineWreaths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What can you do, when your best friend is dying?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravity's End

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this prompt: "One of the twins is dying in some manner (i.e. cancer, incurable disease, magical means, etc) and the twin dying has x-amount of time to live. Pick whether the twin not dying tries to use that time to spend with the other or spends that time trying to come up with a cure and falling short. Slather it in angst. Add smut in there somewhere if you want."

Dipper told her after the fact what had happened, how the nightmare had started. Mabel had left the box of her pregnancy kits out on the bathroom shelf, and he had, for a laugh, “tried it out himself.”

He was confused when it had come up as positive, as did the second he tried. That was when he had searched online for what it had meant, and in a panic had insisted Grunkle Stan drive him to the hospital. A skeptical nurse and a barrage of tests followed, then tense hours of waiting on edge, ending with the nurse passing from skepticism to pity as he got the news.

It was then that he came home, eyes wet as he finally told his sister, who he had left at the Shack in a rush, worried sick about her brother vanishing without notice.

He was dying.

He hadn’t known why he, at his age, would have had cancer so severe, until the doctor asked him in passing: “ _Have you had access to or worked with radioactive substances in the last five calendar years?”_

It had been two summers before that the portal had been activated, that Grunkle Ford had come home. Mabel and her brother both remembered the unpleasant tingling, the heat of the blue glow, but neither had thought it out of the ordinary in the midst of a summer filled with ghosts and otherworldly horrors.

The others were tested soon after, and while Mabel and Ford were surprisingly unharmed, Soos and Grunkle Stan both had minor tumors that were caught, excised, and treated. Grunkle Stan had to have a kidney removed, but Ford had offered to donate his if needed barely before the doctor had finished telling them about the removal.

Their prognosis was good, the doctors had said after the surgeries.

They never said that for Dipper.

He had shown her the charts, a few days before the first of the chemotherapy treatments designed to try and fight back against a war that was probably already lost. The winking white spots on the full-body outline, where the marker dye had shown signs of metastasis across too many organs, too much for surgery or a chemical scourge to reach. She had cried, more times than she could remember, but her twin’s words were what had left her numb:

_“Heh, look Mabes,” he had said with a weak smile, “Now I’ve got two constellations instead of just one.”_

She had hugged him, trying to reassure him in broken, choked sentences as she lied that she knew everything would be fine, and he gave her reassuring pats on the back as he played along, but she could feel, her heart aching as she had realized that night in their bedroom in the Shack:

_He already accepted it._

That wasn’t to say Dipper just sat back and didn’t fight it; He helped Mabel and Ford and even Stan research through the journals, looking for treatments, anything to hold back the tide. However, he was too weak to go with them, waving goodbye to his sister each day she went out with a new goal in sight while he sat in the armchair, the drip fighting an uphill battle to slow the coming of the end. Each time she left, she first hugged Dip hard enough to threaten to smother him, fearing that she’d come back to silence rather than his smile and laugh.

She had tried the gnomes, who had a foul sludge that caused his hair to temporarily turn a brilliant mahogany red for an evening, but nothing else. She’d sought the Manotaurs, who gave her a bag of lozenges that tasted like soap and did nothing but make her brother nearly vomit when he tried one. Everywhere she turned, she either got snake oil nonsense or looks of apology and sympathy.

She’d even managed to catch Blandin, who had initially been optimistic and had given Mabel a surge of hope ringing in her ears, but had returned with a written reprimand from the Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Agency that threatened his job as well as mathematically-improbable amounts of prison time. When Mabel had stolen his time-tape, she’d been captured by the PAE goons herself before she could find what she needed, and returned to the accursed present with a stern reprimand from one of the buzzcut agents.

Ford had rarely shown up from the basement at all after the initial diagnosis, working on dozens of different unsuccessful devices in turn. Once, she had come down to ask him what he wanted for dinner, only to find him slumped over his workbench, sobbing. She had never seen her Grunkle cry before, and when she went up to tell Grunkle Stan, he went down to comfort his brother, and returned with red-rimmed eyes as well.

 

 

Finally, it was two weeks, two weeks before the summer was over and they were going to go home. Their parents knew, of course, and had visited two or three times a week all summer, but the doctors had recommended that he be moved as little as possible so he had stayed at the Shack instead of being returned home.

That had been two months ago, and for the last week his condition had taken a turn for the worse, and Dipper had been confined to a gurney at the small, local hospital instead of being allowed to stay at the Shack. Mabel had brought a couple changes of clothes, some craft supplies, and a stubborn resistance to being shifted by any of the gently-encouraging nurses who advised her to get some rest each evening.

Instead, she had stayed awake, getting Grunkle Stan to smuggle her in a thermos of Mabel Juice to stay awake, as she stayed by her brother’s bedside. He slept for most of the day now, occasionally waking and giving her a weak smile and chuckle when she’d hurriedly and excitedly show him the latest piece she’d completed.

The wall around his bed was surrounded by pieces she’d made; Little beglittered honeybees and a hive with the cheery words  _“Bee optimistic!,”_ a rainbow with a dancing unicorn coated in so much glitter that Mabel was half-sure the nurses kept trying to brush most of it off when she wasn’t looking, a gnome-golem with scowling faces and red hats that had an oversized speech bubble that said  _“You can’t beat us! If you can beat us, you can beat anything!”_

However, while the fading sunset glow made for a shimmering glitter corona that filled the room, the light seemed to fade around his bed itself,  rendering the decorations gaudy and hollow instead of encouraging like she’d hoped. The one piece he’d seemed to like best, a sequined shooting star like the one on her favorite sweater, hung over the middle of the bed. It caught the last few rays of sunlight and seemed to catch fire, but Mabel still felt like the warm light was lying to her as she saw Dipper’s blue-and-white hat hanging below the star, in grey shadow that ignored the burning warmth above it.

 

 

It was quiet now; Soos and Wendy had headed home for the night hours ago, and the Grunkles had retreated to their nightly post in the chairs outside the door; Judging from their snores, they had fallen asleep ages ago. Mabel had just sat back in her chair, starting to knit yet another sweater as she had ran out of construction paper and glue early this morning, when she heard her brother cough, a sharp noise against the steady beep of the monitors.

In an instant, she was by his bedside, holding his skeletally-thin hand now as firm as she dared. The doctors had said that the chemo had been having some encouraging results, but that his health and condition had continued to slip; In hushed voices they tried to be optimistic, but the message had come through like blunt thunder to her ears: While Dipper might make it if he lasted the night, the odds were abysmal that he would. The clock showed a dim  _4:04 AM,_  but he looked even worse than when he had gone to bed early the night before.

He gave her another weak smile, reaching over slowly and painfully to pat her arm with his. “Hey, hey there sis…Don’t-don’t be looking glum for my sake.” He gripped her back, his grasp so weak that Mabel wouldn’t have known he was trying if not for the effort he was showing in his face.

She smiled, tears starting to well at the sides of her eyes as her vision blurred. She buried her face in his shoulder, starting to sob a little before catching herself, willing herself to be strong for him. She hugged him fiercely, pulling back to give him a faint smile through her tears but feeling her heart plummet as she saw him staring. His gaze was unfocused, his brow furrowed as he coughed wretchedly and said with a tremor in his voice:

“Mabel, I’m… _I’m scared.”_

She wanted to tell him it would be all right, that everything would be fine, reassure him like she had on so many nights before in this, the summer that the worst thing that Mabel had never dared thinking about was going to happen, not since that one night when she was five that gave her nightmares so bad she forbid herself from thinking about it again.

Instead, she had just pulled him close again, her voice breaking as she sobbed “Me-Me too Dipper.”

They hugged, squeezing each other tight, Mabel trying to memorize the feeling of her brother, his smell, his breath, his appearance even as she mentally edited it to before all this happened. She cursed bitterly to herself that she didn’t have her brother’s eye for detail, that she could feel details of him, little things that now were more important than anything she could imagine, slipping away.

The worst thing was she couldn’t  _remember_ what details she was forgetting, and so she just tried to remember anything, everything she could in the little time she knew she had left. She felt helpless, wanting to be mad at something but unable to do anything other than hold her brother close and try to burn the memory of  _him_  into her mind.

Soon, he went still, and she jerked back to see him staring off. His breath was coming in short gasps now, but he managed to focus on her and said “H-hh-hey, M-Mabes. Could you-could you play that m-m-music box one more time for me?,” his voice stuttering between the breaths.

She nodded, frantically turning and plunging her army into her pink kitty backpack, ignoring the scratches of colored pencils against her hand as she grabbed the little wooden hexagon and flipped it open, cranking the knob quickly before letting it begin to play.

They had found it in an antique store at the end of that first summer, and Mabel had decided that it reminded her of their time at the Shack with their Grunkles and adventures. Dipper had agreed, and they’d played it nearly nonstop on the eight-hour bus ride home. Thankfully the bus had been mostly-empty almost the entire way, and the twins had even come up with a little song they sang along to it.

[Mabel began to sing, ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED0o3vwE7uM)her voice tightening and her shoulders shaking as she could feel Dipper’s hand on hers, his voice stuttering and weak as he pitched in as best as he could. Mabel could feel a smile nonetheless, as the first glimmers of light began to light under the clouds of the morning as they sang.

She hadn’t noticed when he’d stopped singing along, but she felt as he slumped backwards, and she dropped the box to crack on the linoleum floor as she held his still form, sobbing his name over and over again as the last few notes of the music box mingled with the steady tone of the monitor.

In the end, his name just morphed into a stream of pleas, apologies, begging, and finally just wracking sobs as her Grunkles came running in. It didn’t matter, though:

 

 

Mabel Pines, for the first time, was alone.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He sobbed, his arms passing through his sister as he tried, frantically, to grab her. He was wailing, the sound something he wasn’t even aware of making as he tried and failed to hold his sister, feel her. He knew what had happened, his mind refusing to accept it even as he saw his transparent, shimmering blue arms pass through his sister’s shaking shoulders.

His head hung, Dipper almost didn’t notice the tap on his shoulder. He did, however, notice the almost-jovial voice call to him “Hey, Pine Tree!”

He looked up, eyes shimmering with tears, and let out a groan. He’d had suspicions, of course, that he’d see Bill Cipher once he eventually passed, but he’d hoped he’d have at least a  _little_  time before he showed up.

The squat yellow triangle leered at him, though, and if he had a mouth and ears, Dipper would have sworn he’d have been grinning ear to ear.

“Man, tough break Pine Tree. So young, so innocent, and all that jazz.”

The pyramid floated over to over Dipper’s bed, eclipsing the star decoration and hanging hat. He clucked his tongue, but then looked up almost as if he remembered something as the nurses began attempting to resuscitate Dipper.

“But, hey now, I think I can help make an exception to the rule every once in a while for such a _promising_  individual,” he said, snapping a finger.

Below him, Dipper could see his body surge, taking a shuddering breath as Mabel stumbled back, letting out a squeal of unmitigated joy. Dipper was at a loss for words, before stumbling out a “Oh _thankyouthankyouthankyou_ ” to Bill and going to re-insert himself in his body-

He passed right through, just like he had with his sister, and Bill clucked his tongue again.

“Ah, see, there’s the problem, kid. Ya _died_ , for realsies, and that kinda voids your ability to go back to that whole “living” thing. Heck, now you can’t even do the whole poltergeist thing with the puppets like you pulled last time.”

Dipper just turned to Dipper’s ghost as horrified realization dawned, and the pyramid tipped his tophat in a bow, as he sank towards Dipper’s physical body as Mabel hugged it tightly. “I should be the one thanking you for being so agreeable with that open-ended contract way back when. Seriously, once I get bored of steering you around, I’ll _owe_  ya one. Toodles!”

Then he disappeared into Dipper’s body as Dip’s spirit watched on, and he-No,  _Bill_  hugged his sister. Dipper could feel his throat clench in rage as Bill said, in his voice, “Hi-hiya, Mabes.”

Dipper’s rage melted to a hollow, empty echo as he heard his sister say back, happier than he’d ever heard her before, “I was worried we’d lost you, Dip. Don’t ever scare me like that again,” she said, a mock reprimand in her words as the sentence dissolved into tears at the end.

Bill, smiling with slitted eyes directly over his sister’s shoulder and to Dipper’s floating form, hugged her close, and said “I’ll do my best, sis.”

The room below broke into relieved laughter, as Dipper’s ghost floated above them, his crying and begging unheard.

 

 

Dipper Pines, for the first time, was alone.


End file.
